Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

Unlike most of what I review in this newsletter, Caste is not a business book. But it is a book with deep implications for social change, and especially racial justice. Wilkerson makes the strong case that race dynamics in the US must be seen through the lens of caste: of a social order where everyone knows their place, birth (not competence) determines status, those of higher status actively defend their position, and deviations are harshly punished.While it’s positioned as an examination of caste in three societies: the US, Nazi Germany, and India…the US dominates. The occasional glimpses into the other two seem useful add-ons. She sees the US drawing from the thousands of years India has embraced caste, and Nazi Germany in turn looking to the American South to determine the outer limits of how much oppression they could get away with (pp. 78-88). But American examples take by far the largest share.

And Wilkerson makes the first logical argument I’ve seen for why white working-class voters in the US so often vote against their class interest and for politicians aligned with the economic interests of the 1 percent—the super-rich who actively extract wealth from those who have the least. They support these politicians who keep them at the bottom of the white portion of the class ladder because caste is more important than class in maintaining the social order. Wilkerson argues persuasively that lower-status whites need caste (p. 181). The lowest white is treated better in many situations than even the upper elites of black society: the system reinforces racism in thousands of ways, both overt and subtle. And this may explain why President Obama was so hated and so many white supremacist hate groups sprung up (p. 319), and why Donald Trump’s open racism found willing ears (p. 325). Many of those near the bottom want to make sure there is a lower stratum to make them feel superior—and this is so deeply inculcated into white identity that many are not even consciously aware of their bias (p. 186).

Worse, the success of anyone from the lowest caste threatens the system (pp. 180, 224). Through this analysis, we see the numerous instances of brutal repression against blacks seen as “infecting” an upper stratum. Wilkerson even casts the sordid history of slavery and Jim Crow as leading directly to the US’s far poorer safety net, higher health care costs, higher rates of gun deaths, incarceration, death during pregnancy and labor, infant mortality, and other social ills (pp. 354-355).

She sees caste as afflicting all of us, no matter where on the caste ladder we are. Whites as much as blacks have been deprived of the benefits when black innovators are suppressed (p. 377).

The largely pessimistic book turns optimistic near the end, beginning with a white dinner companion creating a very public scene over the racist treatment they were receiving from a waiter (pp. 365-369), continuing with a great story of how Wilkerson changed a plumber’s racist attitude by forging a connection of two human beings dealing with their grief (pp. 372-375), moving into Albert Einstein’s anti-racism activism (pp. 378-379), and noting that caste was successfully dismantled in Germany after it lost World War II (p. 383).

Then she moves into a call to action: “The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly…If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key…to whatever we may have in common…it could begin to affect how we see the world…Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that …builds to a hurricane across the ocean (p. 386).” And while we’re not responsible for our ancestors’ behavior or our position on the caste ladder, we are responsible for choosing between ignorance and enlightenment. The book’s final sentence is big-picture hopeful: “A world without caste would set everybody free (p. 388).”